When women and men work together, the result is good for business—but apparently they don’t enjoy it much.

That, at least, is the experience of employees in one company, a large US professional services firm studied by economists at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and George Washington University.

Researchers looked at eight years of the firm’s revenue data and employee surveys, measuring satisfaction, cooperation, morale and attitudes toward diversity. That included data from offices or teams that were entirely male or entirely female, along with data from teams that were more evenly mixed.

On surveys, individual employees reported higher levels of job satisfaction when they were on teams that were mainly staffed with people of their own gender. Those on more diverse teams reported lower levels of happiness, trust and cooperation, although revenue figures showed they were more productive and better performing—by a lot. Read More »

After decades of decline, the share of mothers who stay home with their children has steadily risen over the last several years, a new report has found.

In 2012, 29% of all mothers with children under age 18 stayed at home, a figure that has steadily risen since 1999 when 23% of mothers were stay-at-home, the Pew Research Center reported Tuesday. The share of stay-at-home moms had been dropping since 1967, when about half of all moms stayed home. Read More »

The reference to AMC’s “Mad Men” exploded online, inspiring 33,555 tweets per minute, according to Twitter’s government and policy analytics team.

“Women deserve equal pay for equal work,” Obama said. “She deserves to have a baby without sacrificing her job. A mother deserves a day off to care for a sick child or a sick parent without running into hardship.”

It’s a compelling sound bite, but can government really get corporations to shed “Mad Men” practices in a “2 Broke Girls” age? Read More »

A recent dispiriting report on the gender wage gap contains some glimmers of hope.

According to a Census Bureau report, women working full time earned 76.5 cents for every dollar that men did in 2012. That is slightly below 2011’s level of 77 cents, where the ratio has hovered for much of the past decade.

However, a look at slices of the data shows that in the past 20 years, mid-career and older workers have made some progress toward equal pay. Those workers also have the most ground to make up. The wage gap is narrowest for women on the threshold of their careers and widens for older workers.

“Women start out doing well and then don’t climb the ladder as well as men,” said Isabel V. Sawhill, of the Brookings Institution. However, “women have a lot more opportunities now than they did when the older cohort was first entering the labor force.”

In 2012, women 15 to 24 earned 87 cents for every dollar men did, compared with 95 cents in 1993, according to Census. Women ages 25 to 44 earned 80 cents last year, up from 74 cents in 1993. Women ages 45 to 64 earned 73 cents, up from 61 cents in 1993. Read More »

Women earned 76.5 cents for every dollar that men did last year, moving no closer to narrowing a gender pay gap that has barely budged in almost a decade.

Male full-time workers notched median annual earnings of $49,398 in 2012, compared with $37,791 for female workers, according to a Census Bureau report Tuesday. In 2011, women earned 77 cents for every $1 men earned.

The wage gap narrowed steadily through the 1980s and 1990s but the convergence slowed in the early 2000s. That may signal that two factors credited with advancing gender pay parity — education and legislation — lost some of their firepower.

“Women’s increasing education is certainly a plus, but it’s not enough to totally change these trends,” said Francine Blau, an economics professor at Cornell University. “The really golden period was the 1980s, when the wage gap was consistently narrowing. Since then, progress has continued, but it has been more fitful and uneven.” Read More »

But much of the debate pitting Lawrence Summers, the former Treasury secretary and Harvard University president, against Janet Yellen, the Federal Reserve’s vice chair, seems to come back to one word: gravitas.

One oft-cited figure is that women earn 77 cents for every dollar that men make. Even more disconcerting for some policy experts is that the gender wage gap becomes evident almost immediately after college graduation–before pregnancy, before maternity leave, before anyone has the chance to lean in or out.

Since pay raises generally are given as a percentage of someone’s base salary, even a small early wage gap widens into a “gulf” a decade into a woman’s career, says Fatima Goss Graves, vice president for education and employment at the National Women’s Law Center, a women’s advocacy group. Read More »

Racial and gender stereotypes play a part in hiring decisions, a new study finds.

Searching for an aggressive sales manager with a fierce competitive streak? Or a department leader who can foster a team approach?

According to a new study, hiring managers may be more inclined to fill those roles based on racial and gender stereotypes than on candidates’ actual skills and personality.

A forthcoming paper in Psychological Science finds that traits associated with masculinity – such as competitiveness and aggression – are also associated more with blacks than with persons of other races.

More effeminate traits – such as a tendency to collaborate – are linked with Asians more than to other groups. Such assumptions play out dramatically in the job hunt, according to research findings from Harvard and Northwestern universities.

According to a just-released Catalyst study, managers are more likely to pick men for highly visible projects.

When it comes to the hot, high-profile jobs that lead to big promotions, managers overwhelmingly pick men for such plum roles, according to a new study, released Wednesday.

Even when they are equally qualified, women are generally given smaller budgets, fewer direct reports and less exposure to the C-suite than their male counterparts, according a poll of 1,660 professionals of both genders in 2010 and 2011 conducted by Catalyst, a nonprofit research group that aims to expand opportunities for women in the workplace. The findings suggest that women aren’t getting the same opportunities for professional advancement as men. Read More »

About At Work

Written and edited by The Wall Street Journal’s Management & Careers group, At Work covers life on the job, from getting ahead to managing staff to finding passion and purpose in the office. Tips, questions? email us.